Unicef Leader Takes Risks in Push Toward $1 Billion Goal

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images For Unicef

Visit the tech gadgets aisle at your local Target, and you’ll find, nestled amid Garmin watches and Fitbit bands, the Unicef Kid Power activity tracker. Its rubbery straps come in candylike hues of tangerine orange and aqua blue. There is a Star Wars-theme option, too, with the tagline “Force for Change.” Sticker price: $39.99.

Target has sold nearly 150,000 Kid Power activity trackers, which enables users to rack up points that translate into donations to feed hungry children. It is the retail giant’s second-best-selling fitness tracker.

How did a nonprofit launch a successful consumer product, muscling itself a small perch in the fast-growing multibillion dollar wearable tech market?

Unicef Kid Power and the in-house innovation lab from which the idea sprung are just some of the ways that Unicef USA CEO Caryl Stern is shaking up one of the nation’s biggest and most recognizable nonprofits.

“One of the things I would say about Caryl is she is not afraid to take risks,” says Rajesh Anandan, senior vice president of strategic partnerships and Unicef Ventures and a principal architect of the Kid Power effort. “She’s willing to go for broke. She pushes her team to be ambitious and think big and be willing to fail.”

That leadership style has served Unicef well in the past decade, during which time Ms. Stern reworked the organization’s management structure, shepherded multiple big campaigns, cultivated a roster of celebrity supporters, and more than doubled fundraising to $566 million last year.

“I’d like us someday to be a billion-dollar organization,” Ms. Stern says.

Whether any of it is enough is a question that looms large for Unicef USA, also known as the U.S. Fund for Unicef, and other international aid organizations. Half the world’s record-high 22.5 million refugees are children, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2016, 5.6 million children under the age of 5 died, more than half from causes preventable with simple interventions. The Trump administration has proposed to slash the foreign-aid budget by nearly a third and cut the number of refugees admitted to the United States next year by 40 percent.

For her part, the 60-year-old Ms. Stern says it’s the decades of results that keep her hopeful and charging hard. Unicef programs helped halve the under-5 child mortality rate since 1990, she notes. The organization helps immunize 45 percent of the world’s children and provides 80 percent of a nutrient-rich peanut paste distributed worldwide every year to prevent starvation.

“And no matter where I’ve traveled, I have been consistently struck by the sheer tenacity of human spirit and the positivity that children have, no matter what the circumstances they find themselves in,” Ms. Stern says.

Daughter of a War Refugee

Before joining Unicef USA, Ms. Stern had no experience in global development. What she did have was an intimate, albeit tragic, connection to the millions of children the nonprofit serves.

In 1939 Nazi-controlled Austria, Ms. Stern’s grandparents handed off Ms. Stern’s then 6-year-old mother and 4-year-old uncle to a family friend. They were war refugees bound for the United States.

The family later reunited but not before Ms. Stern’s mother spent the war in an orphanage in Manhattan run by a Jewish relief agency.

Her mother, Ms. Stern says, was a lifelong activist.

“As soon as you were old enough to hold a sign, she put one in your hand. We marched on everything,” Ms. Stern says of her childhood in New York.

In 1987, after working for several years as a college administrator, mostly in student affairs, Ms. Stern joined the Anti-Defamation League, a group she had been exposed to while volunteering with her family in the early ’70s.

She would go on to spend a total of 18 years there, mostly overseeing anti-bias education and training programs that eventually reached around the world. She managed dozens of employees and hundreds of contract workers and built up a thick Rolodex of individual and corporate donors.

By the early 2000s Ms. Stern had risen to chief operating officer, working closely under the Anti-Defamation League’s longtime national director, Abraham Foxman. She learned a lot from the charismatic Mr. Foxman, she says, including the value of brilliant public speaking and the importance of relationships.

But Mr. Foxman, one of the most prominent and potent Jewish nonprofit leaders in the world, also cast a long shadow.

“He had a very autocratic style of leadership, and I recognized why it was necessary, but I also recognized why for me it wasn’t my most productive style,” Ms. Stern says. “And I was really clear that if given the chance to run an organization, it was not the way I wanted to run it.”

By the mid-2000s, it was apparent to Ms. Stern that that chance would not be at the Anti-Defamation League. Mr. Foxman expressed zero interest in ceding the top job. (He retired in 2015.)

“I was ready to move; he wasn’t ready for me to move,” Ms. Stern says. “And what was always a casual and trusting relationship became a more tense relationship.”

So when then-Unicef USA CEO Charles Lyons offered her the chief operating officer job in 2006, she took it. And what Ms. Stern thought was a lateral move quickly became an opportunity for something more when Mr. Lyons, just weeks after Ms. Stern started at Unicef, announced plans to leave for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The board named her interim CEO but indicated that Ms. Stern would not be the permanent replacement, proceeding with an international search. With the encouragement of Mr. Lyons and others, Ms. Stern decided to apply anyway.

She had never been to Africa.

“In all honesty, I had to first prove to myself I could do the job,” she says. “I had never been a CEO. And I sure as hell had never been a CEO of anything related to humanitarian aid, of which I knew nothing. I studied a lot. A lot.”

Building a Team

In a presentation to a search committee that included future senior Obama administration official Susan Rice, Ms. Stern proposed, among other things, reconfiguring how the top executives at Unicef USA worked together. Specifically, moving from a hierarchical structure to more of a team structure wherein the members had equal say.

“They are going to have as much input into decisions as I will have,” Ms. Stern recalls telling the search committee about her vision for how the management team would work. “I will earn my keep. I will have veto power if I truly disagree, if my gut says they’re wrong, but other than extreme circumstances, I’m not going to exercise that.”

After getting the job, Ms. Stern hired an executive coach to help her and her top management team improve the feedback they provide to employees. “He taught me how to do it where it was feedback, not insult,” she says.

But she also insisted on a culture of performance and results. She asked her senior team to make lists of the best performers on their staff, individuals they would go to great lengths to keep.

Then she gave them one year to get everyone else onto that list. “They are either on that list already, or they are gone,” Ms. Stern says.

She also conducted an employee-satisfaction survey, and made adjustments to employee evaluations to include not only performance outcomes but how employees worked with others. A great fundraiser who treats the fundraising team badly isn’t considered a great fundraiser at Unicef, she says.

Julie Skarratt, UNICEF

Market Study of Donors

High on the new CEO’s list of goals was to double the income at Unicef USA in five years, and she came with all sorts of new ideas, her colleagues say.

Ms. Stern commissioned a market study of the Unicef USA donor that organized them into categories to assess how the nonprofit was performing with each and apply resources accordingly. One major takeaway was that while a sizable number of donors with religious affiliations gave to and or through religious congregations, Unicef USA was not marketing to or thinking about how to approach faith communities, Ms. Stern says.

She created a customer-service department to field questions and complaints. It is something few nonprofits have, Ms. Stern says, and it made a marked difference in cleaning up problems like mailings addressed to deceased husbands.

“If I was going to be donor-centric, then I had to treat you like the guy who bought a car from me yesterday,” Ms. Stern says. “And you’re not going to buy another car from me if I can’t make sure that the car you ordered is the car you got.”

Ed Lloyd, COO and CFO at Unicef and a part of Ms. Stern’s inaugural executive team, says another of Ms. Stern’s savvy moves was to invest in building up the group’s eight regional boards, which had gotten scant attention in previous years. They became a pipeline to the nonprofit’s national board, he says.

When it comes to working with board members, Ms. Stern articulates exactly what she needs from them to hit revenue targets, Mr. Lloyd said. That in turn serves to get them engaged and excited about the challenge.

“No one is, in my opinion, is better than her to tell the story of Unicef.”

An Idea Lab

By 2012, Ms. Stern and her colleague Mr. Anandan were discussing ways Unicef could employ different business models to scale up its revenue and its reach. It was a time when Fortune 100 companies — looking to keep pace with nimble and fast-moving start-ups — were setting up internal incubators and ventures teams to generate and quickly test new ideas. Mr. Anandan had a vision for something similar at Unicef.

“If you can combine the insight-driven focus and agility and pace of a start-up with the credibility and scale of a big organization, good things can happen. But it is a big if,” Mr. Anandan said.

Unicef Ventures was born.

Initially, no money was assigned to the nonprofit idea lab — it’s a tough case to make to divert resources from life-saving programs, Mr. Anandan notes — but Unicef was able to attract partners and pro bono professionals. And there was a clear thesis: Take longtime programs, study their core values, and launch new businesses that capture those values.

One early effort was the Unicef greeting-card program. “We looked and said, OK, ‘We have a couple million customers who buy this legacy product in this slowly dying industry. What could we do to meet the needs of those customers today in a way that can scale?” Mr. Anandan says.

The answer was to launch, during holiday season 2014, Unicef Market, an online commerce site where supporters could purchase products handmade by artisans around the world. That now produces more than $3 million in revenue a year.

“The traditional business approach would be try to figure out, How do we sell more cards?” Mr. Anandan says. “The ventures approach is to say, What does the customer need that these cards are fulfilling? What insight could we have, based on that need? And then, could we come up with a business that serves that need in a scalable way?”

From Trick-or-Treat to Kid Power

Those working on Unicef Ventures also looked to Unicef’s decades-old Trick-or-Treat for Unicef program. It’s based on the idea that kids have a need to feel like they are important and can help others, Mr. Anandan says. But participation has been stagnant for several years.

So he and colleagues began working on ideas that would capture those values in a new way. They toyed with concepts like an entertainment series featuring kids as superheroes solving real problems and active learning games. Eventually they came upon the idea of the activity tracker. Within months, working with a start-up called Calorie Cloud, they were experimenting with step counters in classrooms.

An activity tracker could connect two global challenges, Mr. Anandan and Ms. Stern realized: One in four children globally is malnourished; while only one in four children in the United States gets enough physical activity.

Ammunition, the design firm behind hit products including Beats headphones, signed on to design the Unicef Kid Power activity tracker pro bono. In the fall of 2014, there was a small-scale rollout involving 1,000 public-school students in Sacramento, backed and publicized by the city’s mayor and its NBA team.

The following spring, Ms. Stern got a face-to-face meeting with Kathy Kennedy, president of Disney-owned Lucasfilm, “thanks to people I knew who knew people who knew her,” as the nonprofit leaders explains it. They connected immediately, Ms. Stern says, and the entertainment company signed on.

A deal with Target to sell the activity trackers starting holiday season 2015 followed. The musical artist Pink went on “Good Morning America” in late November to promote the program. The activity trackers sold out at Target on day one. A week later, they sold out again.

“We were all surprised,” Mr. Anandan says. “We were a nonprofit building hardware.”

In addition to being sold by Target, the activity tracker can be purchased directly from Unicef USA online. Corporations are paying for the Kid Power school program, which gets activity trackers on the wrists of kids at no cost to families. Adults can participate too, tracking their steps using the Kid Power app.

Nearly half a million people have registered with Kid Power, according to Unicef. Corporate support currently totals $12.7 million. The money generated by the program has helped feed 52,000 children, according to the nonprofit.

Those behind Kid Power say they aim to reach 10 million participants in a decade. “The whole concept of Kid Power in general is at the heart of where we are going now,” Ms. Stern says. “I really would like to have a movement of people who put children first.”

And she aims to keep the innovation rolling.

“All the things that blue-chip charities are not known for are all the things I want us to be known for,” Ms. Stern says. “Without giving up all the historical solid reputation that we have.”

4 More Years

Ms. Stern, who is married and has three children and two grandchildren, maintains a grueling travel schedule that includes weekly domestic trips and as many as 10 international trips annually. In July, she was in New Orleans alongside Beyoncé’s charitable organization.

to launch a multiyear effort to provide safe drinking water to vulnerable people in Burundi.

The chief executive says she and colleagues are keeping a close eye on Washington, noting that while the Trump administration has proposed slashing foreign aid, spending has remained steady so far. The nonprofit moved its 2017 annual meeting from New York to Washington, getting 400 supporters into 196 meetings with policy makers. The next annual meeting will again be in the capital, she says.

“I’m going to take every opportunity on every stage and in every location to scream what the needs of children are,” Ms. Stern says. “And there is probably no more important stage right now than Washington.”

Ms. Stern says she expects to stay in the CEO job until her contract expires in four years.

“I want to go out on the top, not on the bottom. Those are personal goals,” she says. “You want to leave when it is the right time and to be smart enough to know it is the right time, so I’m watching that carefully and closely.”

When it comes to that $1 billion revenue goal, Ms. Stern notes that it is unlikely Unicef will achieve it while she is CEO. But hitting $800 million might be doable, she says.

“This is truly the success of a team of people whose passion and whose motivation and dedication have been the best I have ever seen,” Ms. Stern says. “If it had been left to any one of us, we would never be as good. The sum is greater than its parts.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the percentage of children who are inactive. Also, the story stated incorrectly that Ms. Stern made an appearance in New Orleans with pop star Beyoncé. Beyoncé was not present but was represented by the singer’s charitable organization.